Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
In its sophisticated checklists, grounded research, and illustrative classroom stories, Lindsay Portnoy’s Designed to Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom will inspire you to fine-tune or jump-start your design thinking approach. While reading, I found myself appreciating the book’s rich… Continue reading
Rarely has it been so clear that a unit needs to be scrapped and started over from scratch. In my eighth-grade U.S. history and civics class, which has a lot of curricular flexibility, we focus on… Continue reading
Teaching via Zoom at my kitchen counter, laptop perched on coffee table books, is not the top way I would choose to interact with my eighth-grade U.S. history students. However, by the time we reach the end of each period, I find myself reluctant to say goodbye… Continue reading
Writing a book about teaching is not as hard as it seems. You don’t need an agent, and cold submissions can be very successful. In 2007, I had been teaching for almost a decade, always fascinated by curriculum design… Continue reading
Now more than ever, Trader Joe’s comforts my soul. And recently, it has also shown me how to be a more empathetic leader, to remember the humanity around us. But first, some history. For the past dozen years — as I’ve taught middle school, steeped myself in faculty administration, and mothered two boys — Trader Joe’s has been there for me… Continue reading
Here’s how my second meeting with one class started last week, when three students opened up a chat on Google Meet:
1:16 PM
can i go to the bathroom
1:16 PM
we didn’t have to turn in a current event today right… Continue reading
Writing a letter to a politician is about as “civic” an assignment as we can do within our classroom walls, and it feels especially relevant in our polarized political climate. For the first two years that my U.S. history and civics students wrote these letters, though, I didn’t quite… Continue reading
It has been decades since I’ve wanted to live in the world of a fantasy novel as much as the one in Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. Entering the caverns of a vast secret underground library – one accessed through doors in our world both hidden and in plain sight – made me feel as if… Continue reading
We can link current events to what we teach in the classroom in at least two ways—through content and through character. With content, teachers sometimes wonder how they can justify adding current events to their lessons… Continue reading
For the past 18 years, I’ve taught at secular schools with their own rich sets of values. But Ariel Burger’s Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom brought back memories from my early teaching and, in the process, helped me with two teaching conundrums… Continue reading
